The Turning (3 page)

Everybody sat out in the street until Vic’s baby sister began to scream in the heat and his grandmother yanked the keys from Ernie’s idling Landy and opened the front door of the
house herself. Ernie and Cleo came out pushing and shoving and swearing like sailors and all the wobbegong cousins began to bawl and then Ernie’s Land Rover wouldn’t start because it
had overheated chugging out there in the street for God knows how long, and there was more bitching and backbiting while they waited for it to cool, but Nanna wouldn’t hear a word against her
favoured son.

So here they were now in the hot night, the Jeep and the Landy winding down the hill to White Point. The streets were empty. They drove on through to where the road ended and the white dunes
banked up like a snowfield in the moonlight. Not that Vic had ever seen snow; it’s just how he imagined it going on white forever.

They climbed into the dunes, motors grinding and whinnying. Vic rode the rolls and jerks and tried not to think about food. When the going was smooth the rumble of the diffs lulled him close to
sleep and several times he stirred to see that Uncle Ernie was bogged to the axles and Vic had to get out with his father and grandmother to dig or set a tow rope.

It’s the boat he’s pulling, said Nanna, in defence of Ernie’s driving. It’s the load and all those kids.

Vic’s mother pressed her lips together in the bright moonlight and nursed his baby sister. She knew as well as Vic that Ernie was careless, that he approached every hill in top gear, that
his tyres were pumped too hard.

Nanna directed vehicle recovery. She rode out on the side step and talked through the open window, barking the kind of instructions that only a non-driver could give. After a long time they came
into saltbush country and down into firm tracks that were steady going. The red eyes of the boat trailer up ahead mesmerized Vic until he slept again. When he woke they were down on wide, white
beach that was as hard as a highway. For miles they drove fast and easy until they came to a spit where several campfires burned already.

Vic put up poles and ropes and tarps with the rest of them and ate cold roast lamb and potatoes in a stupor of fatigue. He fell onto a mattress and wound himself in a sheet and slept with the
surf roaring all around him. He woke in the night, certain the sea had overrun them, but it was only the cool breeze rolling over him in waves and he slept on dreamless.

At first light the wind off the land was already hot and it smelt of saltbush and desert. When Vic woke, his grandmother was frying eggs over a driftwood fire. His father and uncle had the
dinghy at the water’s edge and were loading it with big cane craypots. Vic sat at the trestle table beneath the billowing tarp and ate eggs and drank tea from an enamel cup. The girls were
only just stirring now and the other women were still asleep. The men came and ate breakfast and when they were finished Vic helped them push the boat into the shorebreak and jumped in when the
outboard fired.

Ernie throttled them out into calm water and Vic looked back at the other cluster of tents and tarps not far from their own camp. He saw a truck and a tractor and a striped tent big as a circus
marquee. The sun was low on the rolling dunes and he felt tired and strangely old. Today was the last day of the year. He wished there’d been room for a mate on this trip, someone to see 1973
in with, but the only spare seat had gone to Nanna; these days there was no escaping her. And now that the wind was rifling through his hair and the aluminium hull thrummed underfoot, he began to
wish that it was his father at the tiller and not his uncle, because Ernie steered a boat as nonchalantly as he drove. The more confident Ernie was the less cause there was for anyone else to feel
safe. But it was Ernie’s boat not his father’s. They didn’t have a boat, couldn’t afford one. Vic smiled gamely at the old man, reading the amusement in his raised eyebrows,
and held on as they pounded out towards the reef. Beneath him the water flashed by, white, green, blue, yellow. When they got out over the mottled deep, swells rolled in smooth and oily while
Vic’s old man baited the pots with beef hocks and Ernie uncoiled ropes and floats. They tipped the craypots into sandy green holes and left the ropes snaking on the surface.

Back on the beach the carrot-top cousins squealed for a ride in the boat.

While they were tootled around the shallows Vic went up to the makeshift shelter between vehicles and saw that his mother was up. He rocked his baby sister while his mum ate breakfast and
listened to Auntie Cleo talk about fingernails and cuticles. Vic’s Auntie wasn’t really a Cleo; she botted the name from the magazine with the horoscopes and male centrefolds. Her real
name was Cloris. She bored his mum stupid. Vic’s mum did her best to hide it from him but he knew it well enough. She must have been tired this morning because at one moment during
Cleo’s prattling monologue, at the very instant that Nanna happened to look their way, she rolled her eyes at him as if to say
give me strength
. Cleo didn’t notice but
Nanna’s mouth was like a knife edge.

Vic didn’t know why they were all stuck on this trip together but there was no doubt it was Nanna’s idea. She had firm ideas about family, and when she was around everybody
else’s ideas went soft.

He wasn’t quite thirteen but Vic knew a thing or two about Uncle Ernie. The oldies kept it quiet but he knew that with Nanna Ernie had protected status. It was as though he could do no
wrong. Yet everything Ernie touched turned bad. He liked the nags. He played two-up and always knew a bloke who knew a bloke who had something or other on the highest authority. He was, therefore,
always in trouble. It wasn’t unusual to have men come knocking on the door for him as though Vic’s old man was his father and not just his brother. Less than a year ago, just after his
sister was born, Vic and his dad had to take Ernie’s truck out in the wee hours to deliver milk for him. Nobody said where Ernie was. Nanna came along of course. She read out the orders by
the light of a policeman’s torch, and Vic ran until his throat was raw. The streets were dark and still. His father drove and ran and hardly said a word all night. Vic sensed that
there’d been other nights he was spared. Now the milk round was gone in any case.

Vic was always uneasy around his uncle. Ernie
was
funny. There was always a joke on the boil, something to be kept from the women, but you’d never tell him anything important about
yourself. He was always talking, never listening. One Christmas, when Vic was eight, Uncle Ernie arrived out of the blue with a brand new bike for him, a Stingray with a T-bar shift. It was redder
than Ernie’s face and seemed to please his uncle as much as him but Vic’s parents were strangely subdued. As an eight-year-old he had wondered if it was too much, too big a gift. He
suspected they were jealous or even ashamed of their own thrift. Now he suspected that the bike was hot. There’d never been any gifts since.

Ernie, Vic realized, was a live wire, an adventurer. That was his role in the family. Vic’s father, on the other hand, was the one who tidied up after the excitement. You could see
they’d been doing it all their lives.

Ernie and Cleo think they’re irresistible, he overheard his mother say one Easter.

So, said his father, who gets to break the news to them?

Vic sat around with the others as long as he could stand it but when it grew hot even beneath the shade of the tarps he unstrapped his surfboard from the roof of the Jeep and
struck off down the beach. He walked until their camp was just a solitary blot in the white distance.

The waves were only small but he wasn’t much of a surfer yet so he didn’t mind. After the hot walk the water was delicious. He paddled out excitedly and caught a few waves but either
nosedived or tripped over himself. He even fell off trying to sit on the thing out beyond the break; it was like riding a greased pig. But you had to laugh at yourself. With mile after mile of
deserted beach stretching out behind you there was nothing to be embarrassed about. He could have surfed in the nude if he wanted. Out in the calm he dived to the bottom and saw the ripples of the
sandy seabed stretching out forever. The water travelled over his skin like a breeze. He felt free and happy.

When he surfaced he was startled to realize that someone was watching him. Up on the crest of the first dune somebody sat with their arms across their knees. He couldn’t make out if it was
a man or woman, boy or girl, and he hung in the water, holding his board, waiting for them to move off, but whoever it was stayed put. Vic grew a little nervous. He supposed he could lie here all
day if need be; he could maybe paddle out if he felt really threatened but he didn’t get the chance because a big set came through while he had his back to the sea. The first wave sent him
bum over breakfast onto the sandbar and snatched the board from his grasp, and the four monsters that followed slammed him, tumbling, along the bottom, holding him down so long that when he finally
surfaced, with his shorts halfway down his legs, he gave out a pathetic squeak more embarrassing than the fact of his bare arse. He dragged up his shorts and stumbled, coughing, along the shore to
where his board lay washed up.

Over on the dune the stranger clapped. It was a girl and not one of his cousins. He wanted to snatch up the board and walk back to camp then and there but he was winded and weak at the knees, so
he sat on the thing with his back to the girl and did his best to ignore her. Bitch. But he felt so stupid with his head sunk between his shoulders out in the middle of an empty beach like this. He
was like a turtle trying to pull its head back into its shell. He hunched over, fuming. A stream of water gushed from his nose.

Well, you didn’t see that one coming, said the girl, suddenly behind him.

Vic whirled around and a string of snot and saltwater landed on his arm. While he scrubbed at it with his knuckles, he saw the green polish on her toenails.

Sorry, she said. Didn’t mean to sneak up on you.

Vic shrugged. The sun was right behind her head; he couldn’t see her at all.

Nice in the water?

Yeah, he said. Nice.

I was wondering. If I could have a go on that thing.

She stepped over and put a toe on the board. She wore Levi’s and a tee-shirt that said Phi Zappa Krappa. There was a picture of a naked man sitting on the toilet.

Okay, he said.

You sure?

He shrugged again.

Always wanted to try, she said. And Christ, I’m so bored. You know?

Vic smiled hesitantly and wiped his nose twice – once with each hand. He got up off the board. The girl reefed off her shirt and shucked down her jeans. She dropped her mirror shades onto
the little pile they made on the sand. She wore a lime-green bikini with little plastic hoops at the hips like that Bond girl. Sunlight caught the fine down on her thighs. She had brown hair that
swung across her back. She had real breasts. She was older, much older than him.

Any tips? she said, hoisting the board to her hip.

Um. Don’t fall off?

She smiled kind of sideways at him and walked down to the water. He watched her go, alert to her calves and the way her bum moved. He wondered what it’d be like to have an older sister.
How could you stand the sight of all that flesh without turning into some kind of sister-weirdo?

As a surfer the girl was no more a natural than he was. Her hopeless floundering came as sweet relief. When she came back she dropped the board at his feet and squeezed the water out of her
hair. There was sand salted down the front of her legs. She was pretty. He didn’t know where to look.

Thought you’d come out and help me, sport, she said, grabbing up her shirt and wiping her face on it.

Sorry, he mumbled, turning away from the sight of her dabbing at her chest with the damp shirt.

What’s your name?

He told her.

From the city?

He shook his head. Not anymore, he said. We just moved down south. Angelus. It’s pretty crap.

He looked at her green-painted fingernails as she flapped the shirt. Something wasn’t right.

She sat on the sand and crossed her legs like a primary schooler or a hippy. She pulled on the mirror shades and then he saw it. There was a finger missing.

What? she said.

Sorry?

The finger?

No, he said.

Bullshit. Come on sport, own up. Here, look.

She held up her left hand. The third finger was little more than a stump.

Vic felt himself grimacing, tried to undo his face but she’d seen it.

Hay baler, she said.

Oh, he murmured, not knowing what a hay baler was. It sounded like a farm thing.

You on a farm?

Kind of. Boarding school, really.

Did it. Hurt?

Like a total bastard, she said. But, you know, all the big things hurt, the things you remember. If it doesn’t hurt it’s not important.

You really think?

She grabbed him by the ear, pinched his lobe so hard he saw spots, and the more he tried to squirm free the tighter she gripped him. It felt like his whole ear would be uprooted from his head.
She was a psycho; he was stuck out here with a psycho and he had tears in his eyes now and she had her mouth on his, kissing him soft and slow until his mouth slackened, and all the time, even
while her tongue slid across his teeth and he snorted like a frightened horse through his nose, she squeezed his ear without relenting until the long hot kiss was over.

She let go. He gasped.

See?

See
what
? he said, grabbing his ear.

You won’t forget your first real kiss.

You’re nuts!

Wrong choice of words, sport, she said, looking down at the stiffy in his shorts.

Vic hunched away from her.

Just trying to make a point, she said with a grin.

Fuck you, he said.

My mother’s worried about my wedding day. Says it’ll be awkward when my husband goes to put the ring on in front of all the dearly beloved.

Does it worry you? he asked, despite himself.